<p>I'm a reporter for The Daily Princetonian covering an interesting story. (Please see last paragraph for info on contacting me about this.)</p>
<p>Two Yale students recently gave speeches at their high school about what they called "financial aid leveraging." This process involves getting into a school that is known for generous financial aid, like Princeton, and then using that offer to then get the other schools where you were accepted to match the package.</p>
<p>This has evidently worked for several students at Yale, who had taken their Princeton financial aid documentation from their acceptance letter and got an equivalent offer from Yale, often amounting to a savings of $15,000-20,000 over four years.</p>
<p>My question to everyone on College Confidential is, is this something that you would consider doing, and is it the right thing to do to get better financial aid?</p>
<p>Is this unfair to other people applying to financial aid at say, Yale, who don't have an offer from Princeton and can't get the Yale financial aid office to lower their amount?</p>
<p>If this causes students who would have loved to attend Princeton to lose out to someone with better stats who is using Princeton solely to get better aid somewhere else, is that right?</p>
<p>If you are interested in giving us responses to appear in an article in tomorrow's issue of The Daily Princetonian, please e-mail <a href="mailto:news@dailyprincetonian.com">news@dailyprincetonian.com</a> with your contact information and a reporter will get in touch with you shortly.</p>
<p>while i'm all for this sort of leveraging, which only benefits admits, i also think it rather violates the ivy ideal of need-based only aid. how can yale (or any other school) determine that an admit of theirs has a financial need of X, when first considered, but that after A brings them an offer from a competitor, he actually has a need more in the range of that determined by the competitor. of course, the first school will call its process "reconsideration" or some such, rather than offer matching, so as to avoid the appearance of giving merit-based assistance. whatever it's called, it shouldn't be necessary in an ideal world. i fear that the current system allows and maybe even encourages the yales of the world to low-ball its admits, particularly its early admits, then only widen their purses when confronted with the need to do so. their offers should be accurate, and generous, to begin with.</p>
<p>well, i don't really care to be quoted by the prince (please, thank you); i just wanted to share my thoughts on the matter here. still, i look forward to reading the OP's article tomorrow.</p>
<p>hmm, in regards to that
by showing a university the better financial aid package you were offered at another university, would that be disadvantageous to you in anyway?
like, could the university withdraw their offer of acceptance, thinking that you dont take them seriously enough?</p>
<p>No, of course not! After colleges have sent off all their decisions the tables turn, now colleges have to convince the accepted to attend their school over another. Imagine that an 18 has found the cure for cancer and has applied to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. All three of these schools would love to have the kid not only because he is obviously brilliant, but also because of the huge amount of press for the school it would generate. The press which would in turn prompt more people to apply next year and allow the college to be even more selective (which would cause their USNews ranking to jump and continue the cycle.) HYP would therefore do whatever possible to convince this applicant to matriculate. It becomes a bidding game with the student, in the end, winning. This is a very common practice and is, in fact, recommended by guidance counselors and parents alike.</p>
<p>while i am not a proponent of using financial aid from one school to get another to match it, I just wanted to point out that this is a daily occurence in the athletic world. Athletes use others' offers to get other schools to recruit them and use scholarship money to get more money from schools that want them more. Just because you aren't an athlete doesn't mean that you can't use the same tactics. For an athlete, often times, the bottom line is money because a sport takes up a huge chunk of time and money traveling to tournaments practices etc (i am a soccer player), so I guess it is ok in that sense, but the same could apply for normal students.</p>
<p>I have no problem with comparing offers from different schools to which I was accepted, but I am a little troubled by applying to a school you don't want to attend just to get a Financial Aid number you can use in bargaining with your prefered college.</p>